In 1938 T.S. Eliot struck up a friendship with Mary Trevelyan, a passionately curious woman and intrepid traveller. Their relationship was cosy and domestic - characterised by churchgoing, record-playing, day trips with Mary at the wheel or Eliot in his rolled shirt-sleeves cooking up sausages for dinner. Over the years, Mary came to believe that their friendship might lead to something more . . . but their journey together did not end as she would have hoped.





Trevelyan left a unique document - of diaries, letters and pictures - charting their twenty-year-long relationship in her vivid prose. Erica Wagner has brought this untold story together for the first time. Mary and Mr Eliot is a revelatory tale of joy, misunderstanding and betrayal that feels utterly modern and deeply human.



Mary Trevelyan (1881-1966) spent a lifetime committed to the promotion of internationalism and peaceful cooperation - especially between young people and students. Trevelyan became the Warden of the Student Movement House in Russell Square in 1938. All her life she remained deeply involved in charitable works and her published works are two remarkable memoirs, From the Ends of the Earth and I'll Walk Beside You: Letters from Belgium, September 1944-May 1945. From 1938 to 1957 she was a close friend and companion of T.S. Eliot, a period about which she wrote in her unpublished manuscript, The Pope of Russell Square.



Erica Wagner is an author and critic. Her books include Gravity: Stories, Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters and Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. Literary editor of The Times for 17 years, she is now a contributing writer for the New Statesman, consulting literary editor for Harper's Bazaar and Lead Editorial Innovator for Creatd, Inc.



A rediscovered story of unrequited love which reveals an intimate new portrait of the poet T. S. Eliot - and of its author, a formidable woman sidelined by literary history.